The use of electronic equipment such as personal computers, servers, and other network operable devices has continued to progress over the past decades. This progression has been accompanied by an increased need to transfer large amounts of data at ever-increasing speeds and the resulting requirement of a sufficiently powerful network infrastructure. One particular area of concentration within network infrastructure has been the plug/jack mating region together with the individual plug and jack components. It is within these components that increasingly offensive crosstalk often occurs at high bandwidths.
As of today, the RJ45 connector has been one of the commonly used standards for making electrical connections within a network. While this standard is widely employed, the physical layout of electrical conductors in an RJ45 connector can cause increasing levels of crosstalk at higher bandwidths. To combat unwanted crosstalk, new plug/jack designs have been implemented. However, to ensure the ability to interface RJ45 components to new networks, it is desirable to have the new plug/jack designed be backwards compatible.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/632,211 and 61/779,806, both of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety, each describe a switchable RJ45/ARJ45 jack that has a movable printed circuit board (PCB) which allows for two different modes of operation. A mode of operation is used when an RJ45 plug is inserted into the jack and supports a performance level up to Category 6A (CAT6A, 500 MHz). However, for higher performance and higher bandwidth (e.g. 2 GHz, 40 Gb/s) an alternate mode of operation is used. The alternate mode of operation is attained when an ARJ45 plug (compliant to IEC 60603-7-7 and IEC 61076-3-110) is inserted into the jack. An example of an ARJ45 plug is described in U.S. application Ser. No. 13/864,924 which is also herein incorporated by reference in its entirety. The long nose of the ARJ45 plug (as compared to an RJ45 plug) causes the PCB to move to an alternate position in the design of both the '211 and '806 patent applications and thus creates the secondary mode of operation.